Hey folks, I havent shared any rough-draft fiction to a general audience in quite some time and its probably still a mistake to do so. But the fact that something is a mistake doesnt usually stop me doing it. Anyway, heres the first rough sketch of a story idea and Im only posting it on Facebook, not a blog, so that it remains a piece of cyber-ephemera. Its slightly Thanksgiving themed, so a bit timely maybe. Enjoy. Or dont. Up to you... I come from that great and terrifying land across the sea, which you know as the United States of America, but which we Americans simply call America. In my exile here in your gracious country I recall my homeland’s perilous beauties with fondness. The USA is not much at all as you’ve probably heard it reported or seen it portrayed upon your screens large and small. The network of ‘living rafts’ that weaves all the disparate states together is far more macabre and sublime to actually physically navigate in person than you can really fathom from this remove. We really have no idea, of course, if the raftworks are organic or not. They just seem to behave that way sometimes, so we call them ‘living’ (as if the call were ours to make). But whatever the raftworks are, the riftworks are still far less understood or navigable. Many people are lost without remainder in those stark and sucking interstices. You swear, swear, swear you’ve triangulated their exact position and are thereby steering clear. But those holes (how can holes be in such stark straight lines?) always have the hop on you. If they’re organic, then surely they’re sentient. And if they’re sentient, then surely they’re malevolent. Notwithstanding these mysteries and dangers, we Americans love to travel! We seem incapable of resisting the inborn urge to criss-cross that vast patchwork, in search of what experience exactly I don’t know. We look for family roots, for new routes to old places, for old ways in the soil and scenery, for new ways in subcultures and socio-architecture, for a connection to nature in flora and fauna, maybe just a pair of horns to be gored upon for lack of a sense of the dramatic, a sense of death-in-life or life-in-death. Yes, the old buffalo-ghosts that finally came back to haunt us, all wraithy whisp and smoke except for the durable serviceable horns, grown now in their return, capable of piercing efficiency. And we flock to them, their ‘maternal herds’ and ‘bachelor herds’ now mixed into a multitude no screen-scene will every properly convey to you. Their charging on the plains, there and not there at once, kicking up no dust yet thundering, growing to fill the horizon, falling upon you with only the weight of floating flying horns if you can stand, ah! I obviously ran at the last moment it was any use to run. Telling you this as I am. Yes, and the buffalo people, the bison people, the coyote and hawk and horse people, the sacred pipe and sacred hoop and crying-for-a-vision people, they live mostly under our skin now (you surely know I’ve brought some with me into your land, contraband I guess), and inside the concrete skins of our cities now, and in the fine wood grains of our panelling and floors and furniture now. Every season, in a new formation, they rise up from all these inert inanimacies and subject us back, murder us back, reserve us back, addict us back, marginalise and erase us back. Yet they do not sentimentalise us back. That is their one harshness to us. For, you see, their slaughter of us is otherwise unnervingly kind. It’s a kind of gruesome joke to them. The last thing you see is the happy laughter in their eyes, the thing you’ve been missing all your life, and it’s a benediction over your grisly demise, a grace you do not deserve. And each season in each new formation when the slaughters have been enacted, they smoke and regale our steaming streaming remains with their star-long tales and by a dawn rising with a light we’ve never seen before they begin to slowly sew us back together, freshly patched into a slightly altered skin-variation each time. It leaves its mark on you I can tell you. But we carry on in our shame and awe and I really can’t tell you what it means. Just that it happens. Now all these things you know and more, and all I’m saying here is that you don’t know them as well as you think you do. But I can tell you more, things you don’t know or have only heard whispered in furtive circuitry. How about the return of the bear-sarks? No, not bear-sharks, bear-sarks, the old name for the beserkers because they were coated in bear skins, terrible warriors that knew no bounds, ecstatic worshipers of fury. They’re coming back, this time not just robed in a skin, but in the whole bear. And if you don’t know about them, then I guarantee you don’t know about the tribe of Trans-Ams and Camaros and Z-28s amassing for defence and counterattack. The automobiles’ intelligences are not artificial, but they’re sure not normal either. People driving bears and cars driving themselves – I told you America was even weirder than you thought! Allow me to elucidate further.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 20:54:25 +0000
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